Signs and portents of the times

Only a fool would try to explain fashions and tendencies in novel-writing. Everything can change so quickly, and it only takes one really good novel to rescue a genre which we’d all thought consigned to the dustheap. A year ago, I would have laughed drily at the notion that the campus novel still had some life in it; the form seemed as dead as the concerto grosso. But Zadie Smith’s brilliant On Beauty revived it with fizzing energy. On the other hand, a fictional standby which has seemed perfectly serviceable for some years may suddenly start looking creaky. I would say that five years ago, the sort of English magic realist text in which characters sprout wings or tails stopped looking like bold feats of the imagination and started looking like the painfully conventional products of creative writing classes.

Sometimes this springs from the insistence of critical comment. For a while now critics have been complaining about new novels set in odd corners of the world, and asking for a little more in the way of domestic realism. They were wrong to think that was in any way a new phenomenon; Beowulf, the very first work of English literature, is mostly set in a foreign country and hardly any of Shakespeare, apart from the history plays, is set in England; it has always been a happy tendency of English writers.

Nevertheless, that does seem to have disappeared for the moment; it was striking that very few of the novels which made an impact last year were set abroad. Louis de Bernières’ Birds Without Wings was an exception, but, having made a career out of it, he can hardly be expected to change path, and he would be wrong to.

Perhaps with more justification, complaints were being heard about a particular way of treating history in the English novel; one which, whatever its merits at the beginning, in such excellent novels as A.